Credit cards are ubiquitous with monetary transactions. They are used in a number of scenarios to purchase groceries, restaurant meals, retail/online products, gas, or just about anything. Most often a cash or check transaction can be replaced with a credit/debit card.
False charges create a tremendous burden on financial institutions and card holder alike. A lost or stolen card can easily be used by an unauthorized user to make purchases. Within several hours of obtaining a lost or stolen card, a thief can fraudulently charge thousands of dollars before a notification process can stop use of the card.
Some safeguard procedures have been put into place:                1. Retail clerk verifies customer signature matches that on the back of card.        2. Retail clerk verifies customer ID matches the name on card.        3. Authorization center uses sophisticated buying profiles to identify a potentially unauthorized purchase.        
These safeguard procedures are not always performed at the point of sale, for example, a gas purchase. Many retail outlets do not require a signature for authentication with purchases under $50, nor does the retail clerk check the card carrier's ID.
There is accordingly an unmet need in the art to provide additional security to the use of credit cards while using the existing underlying infrastructure without changes.
An example of a prior art device is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,954,133, entitled Biometric smart card, biometric smart card reader, and method use issued Oct. 11, 2005, to Travis M. McGregor et al. McGregor claims an alternate means of exchanging data between authenticating bank and card to make transactions more secure.
Another example of a prior art device is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,667,087, entitled Secure Credit Card, issued May 19, 1987 to Max A. Quintana. Quintana teaches a means of obscuring critical account information until a user PIN is supplied.
It is the goal of the present invention to use the policies and equipment of existing infrastructure for credit card purchases. In addition, the present invention provides a means of managing internal account data of a credit card to prevent unauthorized use.